Moyers on Democracy by Bill Moyers

Author:Bill Moyers [Moyers, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: United States, History, General
ISBN: 9780385525428
Google: Ids-AwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-06T21:07:30+00:00

II

Two years ago, in a report entitled “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” the American Political Science Association concluded that progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy “may have stalled, and in some arenas reversed.” Privileged Americans “roar with a clarity and consistency that policy-makers readily hear and routinely follow” while citizens “with lower or moderate incomes speak with a whisper.”

The following year, on the eve of President George W. Bush’s second inauguration, the editors of The Economist, reporting on inequality in America, concluded that the United States “risks calcifying into a European-style, class-based society.”

As great wealth has accumulated at the top, the rest of society has not been benefiting proportionally. In 1960 the gap between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was thirtyfold. Now it is seventy-five-fold. A recent article in the Financial Times reports on a study by the American economist Robert J. Gordon, who finds “little long-term change in workers’ share of U.S. income over the past half century.” Middle-ranking Americans are being squeezed, he says, because the top 10 percent of earners have captured almost half the total income gains in the past four decades and the top 1 percent has gained the most of all—more in fact, than the entire bottom 50 percent.

No wonder working men and women and their families are strained to cope with the rising cost of health care, pharmaceutical drugs, housing, higher education, and public transportation—all of which have risen faster in price than typical family incomes. The recent book Economic Apartheid in America describes how “thirty zipcodes in America have become fabulously wealthy” while “whole urban and rural communities are languishing in unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, growing insecurity, and fear.”

This is a profound transformation in a country whose DNA contains the inherent promise of an equal opportunity at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and whose collective memory resonates with the hallowed idea—hallowed by blood—of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The great progressive struggles in our history have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich, share in the benefits of a free society. Yet as the public today supports such broad social goals as affordable medical coverage for all, decent wages for working people, safe working conditions, a secure retirement, and clean air and water, there is no government to deliver on those aspirations. Instead, our elections are bought out from under us and our public officials do the bidding of mercenaries. So powerfully has wealth shaped our political agenda that we cannot say America is working for all of America.

In the words of Louis Brandeis, one of the greatest of our Supreme Court justices: “You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy, but you cannot have both.” Money is choking democracy to death.

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